Random Accesses

I just saw a story about the NSA gearing up a datacenter to potentially hold a yottabyte of surveillance data. The whole surveillance angle itself is pretty interesting, but what caught my attention was the concept of the yottabyte. The yottabyte is 1024 bytes. That is three levels above the petabyte, which itself is a million gigabytes.

Lets first build up to the yottabyte in today’s standards. A one page Microsoft Word document is anywhere from 50 to 100 kilobytes (KB). A picture from your camera is typically anywhere from 0.5 to 3 megabytes (MB) and a song you might download from Itunes is usually about 3 or 4 megabytes (MB). Moving up the ladder, popular consumer devices such as iphones, ipods, and digital cameras hold anywhere from 1 to 100 gigabytes (GB) of storage capacity. The top of the line hard drives that you can buy at Best Buy are now 2 terabytes.

Assuming Google has 1 million servers each with 1 terabyte of storage (a size Google has already reached or likely will reach in the next year) we can estimate that Google has leap frogged the petabyte and now boasts a total worldwide storage capacity of roughly 1 exabyte. The storage capacity of the approximately 1 billion personal computers worldwide in 2009 with an average storage capacity of perhaps 250 gigabytes (GB) of storage each is not even half a zettabyte!

Source;http://singularityhub.com/2009/11/03/enter-the-yottabyte-one-billion-petabytes/

Toshiba Corporation, a leading innovator in NAND flash memory technologies and solutions, and Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC), a North American subsidiary, today announced the launch of the world's first 64GB1 SDXC Memory Card2 capable of operating at the world's fastest data transfer rate for reading and writing to a flash memory card.

The new card is compliant with the new SD Memory Standard, Ver. 3.00, UHS104. Toshiba also extended its industry leadership in memory card solutions by unveiling 32GB and 16GB SDHC Memory Cards compliant with the world's fastest data transfer rate. Samples of the new SDXC Memory Cards will be available this November, and samples of the new SDHC Memory Cards will be available in December.

Source: http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2009/memy_09_572.jsp

There’s always been an inverse relationship between density and durability when it comes to data storage. Today’s silicon memory chips contain a lot of density, but with a lifespan of just a few decades, they lack durability. Yet primitive forms of storage such as information carved in stone are highly durable, however, they are not dense. Now this long-standing negative correlation between density and durability has been blow to bits with the development of a new memory device that can pack a trillion bits of data into one square inch of medium and retain that data for a billion years.

Led by physicist Alex Zettl, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, have created a digital electromechanical memory device that consists of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle approximately 1/50,000th the width of a human hair enclosed within the hollow of a multiwalled carbon nanotube. The shuttle can be moved reversibly via a low-voltage electrical write signal and can be positioned with nanoscale precision, forming the basis of a binary sequence.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1571

The self-assembling of materials known as block copolymers could provide a low-cost, efficient way to fabricate ultra-high-density computer memory. Block copolymers, which are made of chemically different polymers linked together, can arrange themselves into arrays of nanoscale dots on surfaces, which could be used as templates for creating tiny magnetic bits that store data on hard disks. Until now, though, there was no simple, quick way to coax the block copolymer to make the desired arrays over large areas.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found a simple way to coat square inches of substrate with block copolymers. The highly ordered pattern formed by the copolymers could be used to create hard disks with 10 terabits squeezed into a square inch, the researchers report this week in Science.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/article/22209/

Conventional magnetic storage devices used in consumer electronics, like computer hard drives, MP3 players, and other metallic based products, have separate data storage and execution units. At least part of the delay (or slowness) generated by current products is due to the relatively long way data has to go - being retrieved from the storage, passed to the central processing unit (CPU) for processing and execution, and back again to the storage unit. These back and forth transfers, can dramatically hinder the general performance of the system.

However, the new technology developed by NIST in collaboration with the Korea University and the University of Notre Dame, have proven that thin magnetic layers of semiconductor material could demonstrate antiferromagnetic coupling, where one layer spontaneously lines up its magnetic pole in the opposite direction to the next magnetic layer.

Source: http://thefutureofthings.com/news/6354/a-cpu-that-stores-data.html